Well, Friday night brought on some excitement. I fell while bringing some things in from the car to our hotel room and twisted my ankle. Saturday morning I made an emergency run to Wal-Mart and bought some athletic tape to wrap it up because it still hurt, even though I slept with a pillow under my foot to keep it elevated. Even better – as I was packing up to leave the hotel and MAKE the emergency Wal-Mart run, I realized I was having a migraine aura. Awesome!! I took a migraine med and then a fistful of Ibuprofen, and happily, within about an hour, I was feeling back to normal (minus my sore ankle.) I had to wonder if it’s a GOOD thing or a BAD thing that I know how to wrap my ankle. Yay me for being a distance runner!
So Saturday was… interesting. Very interesting.

Georgie would have her NAJ after this weekend except I was stupid and sent her over a wrong jump. The ending of her course was the same as Payton’s for open jumpers, except in Payton’s course you took THIS jump then that, that, that one… and in her course you just did that, that, and that jump. Well, I sent her over the THIS jump. Bad bad handler ripped Georgie out of a Q and what would have otherwise been her title, because she got another jumpers Q on Sunday.

P came home from all three days with no ribbons and a handful of rotten performances, some for reasons that are just due to inexperienced baby dog, and some due to… I don’t really know what reasons. I wish I was able to point more clearly at what was going on (or what wasn’t going on.) The real plus I came away with for P this weekend: he ran his open jumpers course on Sunday at 5.91 YPS, and that speed is brought down by having to redo his weave entry (all that work on weave pole performance this past couple of weeks, and only ONE TIME did he get his entry the first time – and it was after he already NQ’d his run so OF COURSE) and a second spinning refusal later. Holy crap. I knew it felt really fast, but I didn’t realize until I looked at the times exactly how fast. SCT was 43 sec, his time was 23 sec. The closest time after that was a small border collie at 31 sec. If Payton had run clean and smooth he would have smoked the course under 20 sec.

So just a, um, minor problem of learning how to control the wild man. I’m hoping time and experience will shape things up. Some lady walked past us as I was taking P out to potty and she said “Oh, there’s that wild dog!!” Yeeeeep, that he is. That he is. Sunday on the drive home I announced I want a shirt that says PAYTON SUCKS. And I just saw that AKC is considering rules that will allow people to wear clothing with their dog’s name on it. PERFECT.

Editing the videos together was a little disheartening because they look worse to me than they felt at the time, but I’m probably just being far too critical of two baby dogs.
Georgie completely refused to do the chute this weekend:

And then there’s Payton…